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Obit watch: July 10, 2023.

Monday, July 10th, 2023

The sports department of the New York Times.

The shuttering of the sports desk, which has more than 35 journalists and editors, is a major shift for The Times. The department’s coverage of games, athletes and team owners, and its Sports of the Times column in particular, were once a pillar of American sports journalism. The section covered the major moments and personalities of the last century of American sports, including Muhammad Ali, the birth of free agency, George Steinbrenner, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, steroids in baseball and the deadly effects of concussions in the National Football League.

The paper of record plans to shift sports coverage to The Athletic, which it purchased last year.

As a business, The Athletic has yet to turn a profit. It reported a loss of $7.8 million in the first quarter of this year. But the number of paying subscribers has grown to more than three million as of March 2023, from just over one million when it was acquired.

Evva Hanes, popularizer of Moravian cookies.

Mrs. Hanes, the youngest of seven, grew up watching her mother, Bertha Foltz, make and sell hundreds of the thin cookies to supplement what little money the family’s small dairy farm brought in. Other Moravian women sold cookies, too, adhering to a recipe with molasses and warm winter spices, like clove and ginger, that were popular around Christmas.
Mrs. Foltz began baking a crispy vanilla-scented version as a way to differentiate herself and extend the selling season. By age 8, Evva could bake them on her own. By 20, she had taken over her mother’s business and slowly begun to expand it, selling the original sugar crisps as well as the traditional ginger version but eventually other flavors, too, like lemon and black walnut.

I feel a little guilty about saying this, but now I kind of want to order a tin of Moravian cookies.

Roy Herron, Tennessee state legislator. He was injured in a jet ski accident on July 1st, and passed away on Sunday.

I’ve written previously about both the Dutch resistance and about the NYT‘s “Overlooked No More” obits. In that vein: Hannie Schaft.

In June 1944, Schaft and a fellow resistance fighter, Jan Bonekamp (with whom she was rumored to have had a romantic relationship), targeted a high-ranking police officer for assassination. As the officer was getting on his bicycle to go to work, Schaft shot him in the back, causing him to fall off the bike. Bonekamp finished the killing but was injured doing so. He died shortly after. Schaft managed to escape on her own bike, which was how she got around doing her resistance work.
Schaft was also involved in killing or wounding a baker who was known for betraying people, a hairdresser who worked for the Nazis’ intelligence agency, and another Nazi police officer.
Before confronting her targets, Schaft put on makeup — including lipstick and mascara — and styled her hair, Jackson said. In one of the few direct quotations that have been attributed to Schaft, she explained her reasoning to Truus Oversteegen: “I’ll die clean and beautiful.”

Posted in Food, History, Media, Nazis, Obits, Sports | 3 Comments »

Travel notes: Glendale, AZ.

Thursday, June 29th, 2023

So where was I last week?

Glendale, Arizona, for the annual Smith and Wesson Collectors Association Symposium.

This ordinarily would have been a flying situation, but when Mike the Musicologist heard where the Symposium was, he offered to drive. He’s not a S&WCA member, but he is a gun guy, and I bought him a guest pass so he could look around. Plus he wanted to see Taliesin West, which he has been hosed out of seeing in the past. Plus driving allowed us to take guns more easily than flying.

MtM did see Taliesin West (finally) but they don’t offer guided tours during the summer. Which is odd to me, because I took a guided tour when the S&WCA Convention (it wasn’t a symposium back then) was in Tuscon in the summer of 2010. (I had a rental car and drove from Tuscon to Scottsdale on one of the off days.) MtM did get to take the audio tour, and had a good time as far as I can tell.

I can’t talk a lot about what goes on at the Symposium, since it is a private meeting. I don’t feel like I’m giving too much away by saying Smith and Wesson actually sent a factory rep (for the second year in a row!) to talk with us and hang out at the convention. The gentleman in question even sat at our table during the Saturday night banquet that closed the show, and both MtM and I were able to chat him up about some…things, which I will keep secret but expect to be announced soon.

(Full disclosure: I own some stock in Smith and Wesson Brands, the holding company for the gun business, and American Outdoor Brands, the holding company for the non-gun business.)

The Symposiums are always like old home week to me. I get to meet up with friends that I only see once a year, though some of those folks were missing this year for various reasons. I get to talk shop with my people. And I get to relax for a few days, or in this case an entire week.

The question people always ask me: “Did you buy any guns?” The short answer: no, just paper and trinkets. The long answer: I came very close to purchasing one, and even had a handshake deal with the seller. But we mutually called the deal off for reasons that I don’t think I need to go into here. MtM and I traveled about 2,700 miles round trip…and I did end up buying a gun, not at the Symposium, but about five miles from my house. (Photos to come after part 2 of Day of the .45.)

It was a two-day drive both ways. We decided to take a scenic route going out to Arizona and went down to Del Rio and along the Rio Grande, paralleling the river and stopping overnight in Marathon at the Gage Hotel (and eating at the 12 Gage Restaurant). We did drive through Marfa (and past the Prada Store, but we missed the world’s smallest Buc-ees by just a few days). We also drove through Alpine and past Sul Ross State University, which gave me both an excuse and a captive audience to talk about Jack O’Connor (who, as you know, Bob, taught English at Sul Ross for a while). The second day we drove through Hatch, New Mexico, and up into the national forests before reaching Glendale late in the afternoon.

For the curious: we were stopped by the Border Patrol three times, twice out and once back, though the third time they just waved us through the checkpoint. The longest exchange we had: “Are you both US citizens?” “Yes.” “Anybody else in the car?” “No.” “Okay, go ahead.”

I don’t think we had a bad meal on the trip, though we did eat catered hotel food two nights. (There’s a “cocktail party”, which is really more like a buffet dinner, on Thursday night of the Symposium, and a sit-down banquet to close things out on Saturday night. The hotel food was somewhat better than decent.) Mike and I ate at The Wild Thaiger on Tuesday night after we got in, and I thought that was very good (I had the Mi Dang and we split an order of Dragon Eggz). Wednesday night we took a couple of my friends to the Barrio Cafe, which was another solid choice that everyone loved. Friday night we took a larger group to Giuseppe’s on 28th, which was also universally beloved by everyone who went.

(MtM picked all the restaurants. His secret: he picks places that have been on “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives”.)

I heartily endorse all three of these restaurants, and The Old German Bakery and Restaurant in Fredericksburg.

We took advantage of one of the slower days to go visit some bookstores and some gun stores. The one bookstore we visited (Bookmans) I didn’t buy anything at, though I did think it was a good store. Tombstone Tactical was more of a modern firearms store. They had good prices on new guns, but I didn’t find anything I wanted. Legendary Guns, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of funky mixed gun shop I love. And I bought some books there.

We took I-10 coming back, and stopped for dinner at the Cattleman’s Steakhouse in Fabens (also heartily endorsed), staying overnight at the Hotel El Capitan before the final push back to Austin the following day.

Thanks to MtM for driving, and to everyone who attended the Symposium. Next year: back to Tulsa (which is not that far).

Posted in Beef, Books, Endorsements, Food, Guns, Smith and Wesson, Travel | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 15, 2023.

Thursday, June 15th, 2023

Glenda Jackson. NYT (archived).

Other credits include “T.Bag’s Christmas Ding Dong”, “The Patricia Neal Story” (she played Patricia Neal), and “The Nelson Affair”.

Robert Gottlieb, noted editor.

Mr. Gottlieb edited novels by, among many others, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing and Chaim Potok; science fiction by Michael Crichton and Ray Bradbury; histories by Antonia Fraser and Barbara Tuchman; memoirs by former President Bill Clinton and Katharine Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post; and works by Jessica Mitford and Anthony Burgess.

…

Then, in 1987, in an abrupt career change from the relative anonymity and serenity of book publishing, Mr. Gottlieb was named the third editor in the 62-year history of The New Yorker, one of American journalism’s highest-profile jobs. He replaced William Shawn, the magazine’s legendary editor for 35 years, who had succeeded the founding editor, Harold Ross.

…

His memoir offered a highlight reel of snarky critiques of authors — the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul (“a snob”), Ms. Tuchman (“her sense of entitlement was sometimes hard to deal with”), William Gaddis (“unrelentingly disgruntled”), Roald Dahl (“erratic and churlish”).
“He wasn’t just an editor, he was the editor,” Mr. le Carré told The Times. “I never had an editor to touch him, in any country — nobody who could compare with him.” He noted that Mr. Gottlieb, using No. 2 pencils to mark up manuscripts, often signaled changes with hieroglyphics in the margins: a wavy line for language too florid, ellipses or question marks advising a writer to “think harder and try again.”

…

Mr. Gottlieb joined Knopf in 1968 as vice president and editor in chief. He edited Robert Caro’s Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker” (1974), cutting 400,000 words from a million-word manuscript with the author fuming at his elbow. Despite the brutal cuts, their collaboration endured for five decades and became the subject of a 2022 documentary, “Turn Every Page,” directed by Lizzie Gottlieb, Mr. Gottlieb’s daughter.
“I have never encountered a publisher or editor with a greater understanding of what a writer was trying to do — and how to help him do it,” Mr. Caro said in a statement on Mr. Gottlieb’s death.
Flashing his range, Mr. Gottlieb also edited “Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life” (1981), by Henry Beard, ghosting for the Muppets starlet, and Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” (1988), which prompted the outraged Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa urging Muslims to kill the author.

LeAnn Mueller, co-owner of the highly regarded Austin barbecue restaurant la Barbecue and member of the prominent Mueller barbecue family. She was 51.

I have not seen any updates on the criminal case against the la Barbecue owners. The only obit I’ve found that even mentions it is from the Austin Chronicle.

Jim Turner, former kicker for the Jets.

Turner played professional football for 16 years, with the Jets from 1964 to 1970 and the Broncos from 1971 to 1979. In the 1968-69 season, he kicked 34 field goals and scored 145 points, setting records that stood until 1983, when the New York Giants kicker Ali Haji-Sheikh broke the first and the Washington Redskins kicker Mark Moseley broke the second.

…

The most memorable game of Turner’s career was the Jets’s face-off against the Baltimore Colts on the afternoon of Jan. 12, 1969.
The Colts belonged to the older and better established National Football League, while the Jets were part of its upstart competitor, the American Football League. The Super Bowl, held for the first time in 1967, then pitted the best team from each league against the other.
The Colts, led by quarterback Johnny Unitas and coach Don Shula, had beaten the powerhouse Green Bay Packers, winners of the previous two Super Bowls, en route to qualifying for the 1969 championship.
While Unitas and Shula epitomized the stoic masculinity that many fans associated with football, Namath, the Jets’ quarterback, nicknamed Broadway Joe, was a figure of loudmouth swagger, and none of his public comments had ever seemed less creditable than his guarantee that the Jets would become the first A.F.L. team to win the Super Bowl by beating the Colts.
Namath played well — completing 17 of 28 passes for 206 yards, earning him the Most Valuable Player Award — but it was Turner, a decidedly Off Off Broadway figure, who was the decisive player. He provided the Jets with their margin of victory and alone scored more points than the Colts did.

…

Namath’s prediction came true, and the Jets won, 16-7.

Homer Jones, wide receiver for the New York Football Giants.

Jones was a member of the Giants from 1964-1969, where he was named to the Pro Bowl in 1967 and 1968.
“Homer Jones had a unique combination of speed and power and was a threat to score whenever he touched the ball,” said John Mara, the Giants president and chief executive officer.
“He was one of the first players (if not the first) to spike the ball in the end zone after scoring a touchdown and he quickly became a fan favorite. I remember him as an easygoing, friendly individual who was well liked by his teammates and coaches.”

…

Jones, who played six seasons with Big Blue, ranks sixth all-time among Giants receivers with 4,845 receiving yards and 35 touchdowns.

Not quite an obit, but Nautilus reran a nice article about Cormac McCarthy at the Santa Fe Institute by one of his co-workers.

The entrance to SFI also serves as a mail room. When I first entered the building there was behind the front desk a permanent massif of book boxes. It was clear that the boxes were constantly cleared and just as quickly replenished. In this way the boxes achieved a dynamical equilibrium. In the study of complex systems this is called self-organized criticality and was made famous as an explanation for the constant gradient of sand piles and the faces of sand dunes.
The agent of this critical state was Cormac, who busied himself digging—like Kobo Abe’s entomologist in Women in the Dunes—to ensure balance at SFI and the growth of his library.

Posted in Beef, Books, Food, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 14, 2023.

Wednesday, June 14th, 2023

Cormac McCarthy. NYT (archived). “Cormac McCarthy Loves a Good Diner” (archived). THR. Publisher’s Weekly.

Mr. McCarthy wrote for many years in relative obscurity and privation. After his first marriage, to a fellow University of Tennessee student named Lee Holleman, ended in divorce, he married Anne DeLisle, an English pop singer, in 1966. The couple lived for nearly eight years in a dairy barn outside Knoxville.
“We lived in total poverty,” Ms. DeLisle once said. “We were bathing in the lake.” She added: “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”

I can’t find it now, but I saw the same story recounted in a tweet somewhere: in that version, the McCarthy’s were so poor, they couldn’t afford toothpaste. And that explains why she became the second ex-Mrs. McCarthy.

Mr. McCarthy for many years maintained an office at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit scientific research center founded in 1984 by the particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others. He moved from El Paso to live nearby. He enjoyed the company of scientists and sometimes volunteered to help copy-edit science books, shearing them of things like exclamation points and semicolons, which he found extraneous.
“People ask me, ‘Why are you interested in physics?’,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 Rolling Stone profile. “But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity.” He would drive to the institute after dropping John, his young son, off at school.

Noted:

A correction was made on June 13, 2023: An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to El Paso, where Mr. McCarthy moved in 1976. It is in Texas, not New Mexico.

Layers and layers of editors.

This tableau inspired one of the funniest pieces of wildcat food criticism I’ve ever read. The essay, by Helen Craig, was titled “A Meat Processing Professional Reviews Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road.’” It ran in 2014 on a website called The Toast.
Craig pointed out that such a “living larder” is wasteful. Every day they’re alive, she wrote, “these people will be depreciating in calorific value.” Craig suggested, as any good butcher would, that “the ribs will be good fresh, and a pickling and brining process for the thighs and haunches should result in a product that is similar to ham.”

“The Toast” essay (archived).

“Unless you have an old rancid stockpot that you can just sort of throw every horrible thing into — rotten turnips, dead cats, whatever — and let it simmer for about a month — you’re at a real disadvantage,” he says.

So it sometimes goes in McCarthy’s universe. He goes to great lengths to get details right, then throws his readers a curveball. After all, it’s fiction. Asked about the fettuccine via his publicist (because how could I not?), McCarthy responded, in pure Bobby Western fashion: “No goddamn clams! Put a note at the bottom of the page!”

Jacques Rozier, who the NYT describes as the “last of the French New Wave Directors”.

John Romita Sr., Marvel comics artist.

In 1966, Romita began a five-year run working Marvel editor-in-chief Stan Lee on The Amazing Spider-Man. He took over for artist Steve Ditko, who had created the famed webslinger with Lee in 1961 before leaving in a spat with the comic book legend.
Romita’s run on Spider-Man saw the introduction of a number of the property’s most memorable characters, including Spidey love interest Mary Jane Watson and crime boss Kingpin; it was during Romita’s time as artist that Spider-Man overtook Fantastic Four to become Marvel’s top-seller, with the masked man becoming the face of the company.

Patrick Gasienica, Olympic ski jumper. He was 24, and died in a motorcycle accident.

Park Soo Ryun. She was the star of a Disney+ show, “Snowdrop”. I note this because she was 29, and her death kind of scares me:

Ryun slipped down a flight of stairs Sunday at a property on Jeju Island, South Korea’s largest island, where she was scheduled to perform, according to the Mirror.
The actress was reportedly taken to the hospital for emergency treatment and was pronounced brain dead by medics after attempts to revive her failed.

…

Fellow “Snowdrop” star Kim Mi-soo also died unexpectedly at age 29 last year.

Posted in Books, Food, Media, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: June 7, 2023.

Wednesday, June 7th, 2023

Hossein Khosrow Ali Vazir.

He was better known under his professional wrestling name, The Iron Sheik.

Edited to add: THR.

He was a great admirer of his country’s most famous Olympic wrestler, Gholamreza Takhti. When Takhti was found dead of an apparent suicide in his hotel room in early 1968, theories circulated that he had been murdered, spurring Vaziri to leave the country.
“If Iran is no good for Gholamreza Takhti, the greatest champion we had, Iran is never going to be good for me. So I decided to come to America,” he said.

…

But in 1976, he married Minnesota native Caryl Peterson. Their best man at the wedding was wrestling announcer “Mean” Gene Okerlund — or “Gene Mean,” as he would call him during interviews.

I wasn’t originally planning to link the obits for Andrew Bellucci, NYC pizza guy, because they seemed excessively local.

But the NYT obit (archived) is…interesting. Mr. Bellucci had a colorful history.

Although he had 18 pizzas on the menu, three kinds of dough and any number of toppings, two aspects of his trade preoccupied Mr. Bellucci above all. One was what Mr. Katakis called “a borderline lunacy” about dough. The other was clam pizza.
“Other people put clam pie on the menu but nobody’s that meticulous,” Mr. Katakis said. “He figured out that the clams were going on the pizza cold, so he figured he should sous vide them,” heating them in a hot-water circulator for 45 seconds before baking.
Mr. Bellucci was preparing clam pizzas as a surprise for some guests when he died.

I like seafood, and I’m fond of clams. Clam pizza is a little hard to get in Texas, though: Home Slice Pizza does it, and I’ve had it once, but I haven’t been able to make it back since. Plus nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded. And clam pizza is a hard sell for the rest of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.

Posted in Food, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Bagatelle (#88)

Thursday, June 1st, 2023

Shot: “Restaurant Review: The Peking Duck at Juqi Passes All the Tests“.

Chaser:

Posted in Bagatelle, Birds, Food | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: May 25, 2023.

Thursday, May 25th, 2023

Tina Turner. THR. Pitchfork.

I’m not badmouthing the dead, but I do think there’s something worth pointing out here:

“After suffering a stroke in 2009 because of my poorly controlled hypertension I struggled to get back up on my feet,” she penned. “This is when I first learned that my kidneys didn’t work that well anymore. They had already lost thirty-five percent of their function.”
Turner eventually “developed a fatal dislike” of her prescription pills and even “convinced” herself that they made her feel “worse.”
So without consulting with her doctors, she “replaced” her “conventional medication” with “homeopathic” remedies.
“Indeed, I started feeling better after a while,” the 12-time Grammy winner noted. However, she was in for a rude awakening when she went for her “next routine check-up.”
“Rarely in my life had I been so wrong. I had not known that uncontrolled hypertension would worsen my renal disease and that I would kill my kidneys by giving up on controlling my blood pressure,” she confessed.

Homeopathic “remedies”.

“Are the “dangers of mass popular delusion” not “so menacing”?“

Nicholas Gray, founder of Gray’s Papaya.

For the record: NYT obit for Rolf Harris.

Posted in Food, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Bingo!

Friday, April 28th, 2023

I have a bingo on my buzzword bingo card.

“What Upward Farms calls Ecological Intelligence is a proprietary microbiome technology that introduces a biologically-based reinforcement learning flywheel. By curating a diverse microbiome with genetic capacity for key functions, Upward Farms achieves an autonomous, self-optimising, and highly productive biological manufacturing platform.”

As a smart man says:

Posted in Bagatelle, Food | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 7, 2023.

Friday, April 7th, 2023

Mimi Sheraton, former food critic for the NYT. “Remembering Mimi Sheraton’s Writing and Cooking“.

An adventurer with a passion for offbeat experiences, an eclectic taste for foods and the independence to defy pressures from restaurateurs and advertisers, Ms. Sheraton was the first female food critic for The Times. She pioneered reviewing-in-disguise, dining in wigs and tinted glasses, and using aliases for reservations, mostly in high-end places where people knew her from repeat visits and lavished their attentions on her.
“The longer I reviewed restaurants, the more I became convinced that the unknown customer has a completely different experience from either a valued patron or a recognized food critic,” she wrote in her memoir, “Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life” (2004). “For all practical purposes, they might as well be in different restaurants.”
Colleagues and other restaurant critics described her reviews as tough but fair and scrupulously researched. The Times required three visits to a restaurant before publishing a review; she dined six to eight times before passing judgment. For an article on deli sandwiches, she collected 104 corned beef and pastrami samples in one day to evaluate the meat and sandwich-building techniques.

…

Another of her reviews, based on blind tastings by several Times staff members, favored private-label liquors over popular brand names of Scotch, bourbon, rye, vodka and gin. The review ran weeks before Christmas, the busy liquor-selling season.
“I heard that two million dollars’ worth of advertising had been canceled,” Ms. Sheraton recalled in her memoir. She approached the executive editor. “I asked Abe Rosenthal if that was true. He said, ‘That’s none of your business. It was a great story.’”

…

In her Greenwich Village townhouse, she had 2,000 cookbooks and a spacious kitchen overlooking a backyard where she grew chives, tarragon, mint, sage, rosemary and basil. And she read other restaurant critics, with whom she often disagreed.
“Well, whether they’re right or not, which means they agree with me,” she told The Times wryly in 2004, “food writers in general devote too much space to chefs’ philosophies. They’re not Picasso, after all — this is supper. So I don’t want to hear about a chef’s intentions. Call me when it’s good.”

Bill Butler, noted cinematographer. Other credits include “Raid on Entebbe”, “Capricorn One”, and “Hot Shots!”.

Nora Forster, John Lydon’s wife.

The punk rock icon and Forster met in 1975 at Vivienne Westwood’s famed punk shop Sex and married in 1979, according to Rolling Stone.
The two remained married till Forster’s death and did not have children.

Paul Cattermole, of S Club 7.

Posted in Food, Media, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 30, 2023.

Thursday, March 30th, 2023

As most of my readers know, I am something of a greedy gut. So here’s a semi-obscure food related obit that’s relevant to my interests: Yang Bing-yi.

He founded Din Tai Fung: they didn’t invent the soup dumpling, but they popularized it.

Mr. Yang and his wife, Lai Pen-mei, opened their first modest storefront in 1958, laying the foundation for what would become a franchise that their children and grandchildren have expanded to more than 170 locations across Taiwan, mainland China and 13 other countries, including the United States, Japan, Australia and the United Arab Emirates, with a menu that includes such specialties as wontons in red chili oil, shredded tofu and seaweed salad, and steamed truffle-and-pork dumplings.
A Hong Kong branch has been awarded a Michelin star five times.

…

The secret to the seemingly miraculous stuffing of soup in a dumpling is mixing a scoop of cold, gelatinized broth with the meat or vegetable filling. After the dumplings are placed into bamboo baskets and steamed, the broth melts, forming a rich, fatty soup within a pliant, paper-thin wheat skin. Biting into one delivers a piping hot explosion of flavors and textures.

…

Mr. Hom, the chef and writer, said in an interview that Mr. Yang’s drive for precision — down to the diameter of the wrappers and the weight of each soup dumpling — set a standard that has stood the test of time and transcended borders.
“It’s consistently good, no matter where I’ve eaten, in Singapore, Bangkok, L.A., London,” he said. He added that he had made a practice of eating the dumplings slowly, leaving some in the bamboo basket where they are served to observe whether the soupy filling would hold up within the thin skin. They always did.

D.M. Thomas, author. I never read it, but I remember back in the day The White Hotel was a huge deal.

FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for local figure Murray Callahan. He used to own Callahan’s General Store, which is kind of a famous local spot. It seems tourist oriented to me these days, but I think back in the day before Austin sprawled out that way, it was more of a feed and seed kind of place: a very early version of Tractor Supply Company, if you will. (I went out there once with my folks some years back, which is what I base my impressions on: while Austin has expanded in that direction, it’s still kind of off the beaten path for me.)

Posted in Books, Food, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: February 21, 2023.

Tuesday, February 21st, 2023

Wow. It has been busy.

Barbara Bosson. Other credits include “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, one episode of a spinoff from a minor SF TV series of the 1960s, “Cop Rock”, “The Last Starfighter”, “Capricorn One”…

…and “Mannix”. (“A Question of Midnight“, season 3, episode 5. She was “Miss Riley”. We actually watched that episode a couple of weeks ago because it was the next one in sequence: the “Miss Riley” part was extremely small, and as I best as I can recall, had no lines.)

Lawrence sent over an obit for Lee Whitlock, British actor. Other credits include “EastEnders”, the film of “The Sweeney”, “He Kills Coppers” (a TV movie based on the Shepherd’s Bush murders) and “The Bill”.

Red McCombs, prominent local car dealer and philanthropist. He was also a former owner of the San Antonio Spurs and the Minnesota Vikings.

In 2022, Forbes listed him among the richest men in the world, with a $1.7 billion estimated net worth. McCombs was also a co-founder of Clear Channel Communications, now known as iHeartMedia, and also owned the NBA’s Denver Nuggets.

…

The McCombs family and the McCombs Foundation — the family’s primary philanthropy arm — have contributed more than $135 million to civic causes in Texas since 1981, according to McCombs Enterprises.

Zach Milligan, climber.

Milligan and his friend, Jason Torlano, made headlines in 2021 when they became the first people to ski down Yosemite National Park’s famed Half Dome.

…

Milligan, who grew up in Tucker, Ga., got hooked on climbing at the age of 18 when he was getting a haircut and noticed a photo of Half Dome on the wall, SFGate reported.
He later moved to Yosemite National Park, where he spent 20 years including 13 living in a cave while workin for a cleaning service.
He climbed the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome 20 times and the 1,640-foot tall Steck-Salathé route up Sentinel Rock at least 275 times, according to the outlet.

Eileen Sheridan. She was a major female cyclist in the 1940s and 1950s.

In 1945, her first year of competitive cycling, Mrs. Sheridan won the women’s national time-trial championship for 25 miles, and in the coming years she won at 50 and 100 miles as well. After going professional in 1951, she broke 21 women’s time-trial records, five of which she still holds.
She is best remembered for her epic ride in July 1954 from Land’s End, at England’s southwestern tip, to John O’Groats, at the northern edge of Scotland — an 870-mile trek that she completed in just 2 days, 11 hours and 7 minutes, almost 12 hours faster than the previous record.
She had spent six months training, but the trip was nevertheless grueling, with mountain ranges and rough stretches of road, not to mention cold nights even in the middle of the summer. She developed blisters on her palms so painful that she had to hold on to her handlebars by just her thumbs until her support crew could wrap the grips in sponge.
“We had a nurse,” she said in the documentary, “and she actually wept.”
When she arrived at John O’Groats, after getting just 15 minutes of sleep over the previous two days, she decided to push farther, to see if she could set a women’s record for the fastest 1,000 miles. She took an hour-and-48-minute break, enough to eat a quick dinner and rest. Then she remounted her bike and took off into the night.
She began to wobble toward the side. She had hallucinations of friends urging her on and strangers pointing her in the wrong direction; she even imagined a polar bear. But she stayed the course and made it to her final destination, the John O’Groats Hotel, the next morning, after riding for three days and one hour. She celebrated with a glass of cherry brandy, on the house.
Her 1,000-mile record stood for 48 years, until Lynne Taylor of Scotland finally broke it in 2002.

Roger C. Schank, AI theorist.

In the late 1960s and ’70s, Dr. Schank developed ideas for how to represent in symbols for a computer simple concepts — like people and places, objects and events, cause-and-effect relationships — that humans describe with words. His model was called “conceptual dependency theory.”
Dr. Schank later came up with ways to assemble this raw material of knowledge into the equivalent of human memories of past experience. He called these larger building blocks of knowledge “scripts” and regarded them as ingredients for learning from examples, or “case-based reasoning.”
“When I was a graduate student in the late 1970s, Roger Schank was required reading,” Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, wrote on a memorial website. “He was regarded as one of the major researchers and theoreticians in artificial intelligence and cognitive science.”

FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Leiji Matsumoto, manga artist.

The European audience knows Matsumoto primarily through Space Pirate Captain Harlock and Galaxy Express 999. America owes its anime and manga fandom to the huge TV impact of Star Blazers, the US edit of Space Battleship Yamato. This resumé ignores an immense and almost unexplored hinterland of Matsumoto works, from I am a Man (Otoko Oidon) the gritty tale of a penniless student from the provinces scraping to get by in a cheap Tokyo boarding house, and his first SF manga, the spy-fi adventure Sexaroid, to girls’ manga Natasha and Miime the TabbyCat about one of his beloved cats, who also appears in Captain Harlock. There are his manga biographies of musicians, including David Bowie for RecoFan magazine, and many stories on the pain and pointlessness of the Pacific War. To see Matsumoto purely through the space opera lens is to miss so much of his range and depth.

I am way out of my depth when talking about manga or anime, so I’m just going to leave that link.

William Greenberg Jr., NYC baker. He sounds really interesting:

Mr. Greenberg, an affable redhead at 6 feet 4 inches tall who was raised in the Five Towns area of Long Island, opened his first bakery in Manhattan in 1946, in a narrow storefront on East 95th Street, near Second Avenue, with $3,000 — poker winnings from games he played in the Army. It turned out that Mr. Greenberg was as skilled with cards as he was with a piping gun.

…

Lee Strasberg, the imperious director and acting teacher, loved Mr. Greenberg’s fudgy brownies; so, apparently, did the film director Mike Nichols, who was said to have coaxed his actors into their best work with the promise of one. The actress Glenn Close ordered themed cakes for wrap parties. A well-known decorator was said to have offered Mr. Greenberg’s schnecken (German for snail) — bite-size sticky buns — to his clients along with his bills, to soften the blow…
The writer Delia Ephron was partial to the chocolate cream tart — a cake, actually, layered with fudge and fresh whipped cream. Alexa Hampton, the interior designer, favored the candy cake, topped with shaved chocolate, crowned with rich chocolate squares and blanketed on the sides with vertical piping of whipped cream. Her father, Mark, was a schnecken man.
Another regular, the celebrated violinist Itzhak Perlman — a poker buddy of Mr. Greenberg’s — once ordered a cake fashioned in the shape of Ebbets Field, the storied home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, for his wife’s 40th birthday (not an easy creation, given the stadium’s elaborate Romanesque arches).

…

…they received a call to make a cake for President Bill Clinton’s 50th birthday, in August 1996. They conceived an American flag, made from layers of yellow poundcake. It was a colossus, requiring 432 eggs, 96 pounds of butter, 98 pounds of sugar and 100 pounds of flour, layered with 15 pounds of raspberry preserves and topped with 15 pounds of dark fudge glaze, and it would take two full days to prepare it. (The birthday event was a fund-raiser, and the Greenbergs donated their creation, which would have cost $4,000 at retail.)

Posted in 1970s, Cycling, Food, Mannix, Movies, NFL, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

What goes with fajitas?

Tuesday, January 31st, 2023

Chicken wings, of course!

Remember a few years back, we had a guy busted for stealing $1.2 million worth of fajita meat in Cameron County?

The food service director of an impoverished Illinois school district was charged with stealing $1.5 million of food — most of which was chicken wings.

…

The station reported that Liddell ordered more than 11,000 cases of chicken wings for the district with school funds, but took all the poultry for herself.
“The food was never brought to the school or provided to the students,” court records claimed.

…

The auditor “discovered individual invoices signed by Liddell for massive quantities of chicken wings, an item that was never served to students because they contain bones,” prosecutors said.
The food service provider employees all knew Liddell by name “due to the massive amount of chicken wings she would purchase,” prosecutors said, according to WGN.

Posted in Food, Law | Comments Closed

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